


Five Things That Never Happened toTony Foster

by yuletide_archivist



Category: Blood-Smoke Series - Tanya Huff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-12-23
Updated: 2005-12-23
Packaged: 2018-01-25 08:15:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,990
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1640873
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yuletide_archivist/pseuds/yuletide_archivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Written for Koanju</p>
    </blockquote>





	Five Things That Never Happened toTony Foster

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Koanju

 

 

First

Tony's mother kissed his forehead, gently patting him on the top of his knit-capped head as she stood up. "Be a good boy now," she chided, smiling down at him. "Listen to your teachers. And remember: it's the last day of school before Christmas Break, so you have to be extra-good, okay? Promise?"

"'Kay, I promise," Tony said solemnly, hiking up his Batman backpack.

"Love you, honey," she said, wiggling her fingers in the way that meant she'd wait until he'd walked into the building.

Tony marched dutifully up the steps, but stopped at the top like he always did to turn and wave. And today, because it was the last day of school before Christmas Break and he'd heard his parents whispering about the radio-controlled Batmobile that nobody--even icky Mason Reed whose parents always bought him ev er y thing--had yet, he turned and scrunched up his face like he way blowing his mother a kiss.

"Eeeeyuuuw," his friend Michael said as he reached Tony's step. "You were making kissy faces at Vick-terry!"

"Eww! Was not!" Tony shot back, seriously grossed out. "Vick-terry's like a--like a--she's not even a _girl_!"

"Were too," Michael said, shoving open the big beige wooden door.

"Was not."

"Were too."

"Was not."

"What," Vicki said, popping up like the Joker, "are you guys talkin' `bout?"

"How you...smell like poop!" Michael said daringly.

Vicki shrieked in rage and launched herself at him; Tony stood back, giggling madly as Vicki beat Michael up. He kinda wanted to join in, but Vicki was kinda scary and anyway, his parents might not give him the Batmobile if he got put in time-out again.

It finally took gross, crusty old Miss Pelindrake, who was older than Tony's grandma, a whole five minutes to break Michael and Vicki up. By the time Vicki and Mike were sitting in opposite corners of the room sticking their tongues out at each other whenever Miss Pelindrake's back was turned, it was time to color--Tony's favorite part of class.

Second

"Vicki," Tony whispered into the phone, voice shaking.

"It's--god, Tony, it's three in the morning," she mumbled. "What's wrong?"

"I'm..." He rubbed a hand through his hair: it was sweaty, and stuck to his cheekbones. His parents always kept the heat turned way up too high.

"Tony?" she said, voice concerned now. "Are you okay?"

"Yeah," he managed to get out. "I'm fine."

"You don't sound fine." She sounded suspicious. "Your parents, they aren't--"

"They were," Tony said, "yeah." For a second, he almost hid behind the excuse: but that would be lying, and like his mother had told him three times a day since he'd convinced her he was staying after school to get math tutoring when he was actually smoking dope in the park, lying was wrong.

"Do you need to come over? You know Mom and Dad'll let you. I can go wake them up, we can come get you..."

"No. It's not that." Tony's voice started trembling again. He squeezed his eyes shut, clenching the phone in two damp palms. He could do this. He was a man, and he could do this.

"I'm gay, Vicki," he finally said, all in a rush.

There was dead silence on the other end of the line; the bottom dropped out of Tony's stomach.

"Oh," she said at last, after a long pause in which Tony became increasingly sure she was going to call Celucci, who was then going to gaybash him the second he walked into school. " _Oh_. That explains a few things."

"...what?!"

"It all makes sense," Vicki said, her voice wondering. "It's so obvious now. How the hell did I miss it?"

"Vicki," Tony said in his normal voice, forgetting that it was three AM and he was on the phone illegally because, God, he might be talking to his drug dealer or something, "I'm having a crisis here."

"It's that new Creative Writing teacher, isn't it? What's his name, Mr...Fighugh?"

"It's _Fitzroy_ ," Tony hissed back earnestly, and then blushed scarlet.

Third

Tony had been walking through the streets of Toronto for hours, hands shoved deep in his coat pockets and head down. It was dark and cold, and getting darker and colder by the minute, but he didn't want to go back home. The skyscrapers of the financial district closed comfortably in around him, and he thought of the time his family had gone to the CN Tower on a perfectly clear day. He'd been able to see for miles and miles and miles in every direction, following the highway that went past the Air Canada building until it disappeared into a tiny, hazy pinprick in the distance. His father had pointed out the white shopping center in Chinatown, the one next to their favorite Chinese restaurant; he and his mother had discovered that a black-sided high-rise had a blue track on its roof.

None of that mattered now.

He hunched his shoulders, and lifted a hand out of his pocket to scrub uselessly at his cheek.

By ten o'clock, Tony had reached Kensington. It was patchily lit, the windows of the vintage clothing stores dark but the Moon Cafe still spilling light and noise out into the street. Tony sat down on the low wall outside Black Market, staring at the people pretending to enjoy awful coffee served by rude-but-chic barristas.

His mother had brought him here every Saturday to buy fruit and vegetables from the plastic-covered stalls. The one that had the best apples had been run by a wrinkled grandfather who only spoke Spanish and his two English-speaking granddaughters, round as the apples they sold. The younger granddaughter had always slipped him an apple when her grandfather wasn't looking; his mother always tried to pay for it, but the older granddaughter had always refused to take her money.

The sweet, earthy ghosts of those apples lingered in Kensington's corners, mingling with chili peppers from the Argentinean restaurant whose menu he could never pronounce and the burned-rope smells of the stores with pot-growing manuals defiantly displayed in their windows. All of it made Tony bow his head, desperately pressing the heels of his hands into the centers of his eyes.

He didn't hear anything before the hand touched his shoulder.

He looked up into a pale face, a terrible and beautiful and dangerous face; some deeply-buried primal sense recognized the Hunter and screamed at him to run.

"Kill me," he whispered instead.

Fourth

"Hi," Tony said, "can I help you with something, sir?" He tried to smile--Friendly Customer Service is Our Pleasure--but didn't quite make it; the video store's sweatshop wages hadn't scraped close enough together to cover his rent this month, and as of tonight he was officially homeless.

"Not really," the customer replied. "I'm just looking."

"Okay. Just lemme know if you need anything." Tony sat back down on the stool behind the counter, and began covertly watching the strawberry blond head moving between the racks of movies. The man was, he noticed with disappointment, shorter than Tony himself in relation to the shelves, though he probably made up for it with the nice leather trench coat and the electric blue eyes.

A few minutes later, the man approached the counter. He set down three plastic VHS cases; Tony scanned them while the man punched his PIN into the little keypad. The name HENRY FITZROY popped up on Tony's computer screen. Mindful of the worn-looking piece of paper taped to the monitor, Tony said "That'll be five dollars exactly, Mr. Fitzroy."

Henry Fitzroy dug three two-dollar coins out of a pocket of his coat. They rang against each other musically when he dropped them onto the counter. Tony punched out the till, scooped them into the right slot, and gave Henry Fitzroy his change and a receipt.

"Thanks," Henry Fitzroy said, smiling warmly as he met Tony's eyes. The bottom dropped out of his stomach; he almost forgot to hand over the movies.

"You're--you're welcome," he finally managed to stutter, but by then the bell hung on the door had already chimed shut behind Henry Fitzroy.

Fifth

Toronto was not kind to hookers in winter.

Tony knew this personally: to get a customer, you had to look sexy; to look sexy, you had to be half-naked; and if you were half-naked, you froze to death. (Whether or not this was literal depended on who you talked to.) Different hookers had different strategies for getting around this conundrum, but Tony's favorite had always been to get so wasted he barely noticed the Towncars, much less the bank thermometer reading a stubborn zero Celsius.

So he was wasted.

But not so wasted that the fat guy grunting behind him who'd said "Call me Papi" noticed any difference. After the fat guy was done, he shoved a twenty into Tony's hand, muttering something about he'd stay longer but his wife was waiting. Lethargically, Tony pocketed the bill, and worked on pulling up his pants.

He finally collapsed back against the wall Call-Me-Papi had shoved him up against. He was tired, and his high had left with Papi.

"Damn cheap drugs," he muttered, chafing his hands together. They were turning blue around the fingertips, but maybe that was just the non-light from the fitfully sputtering streetlamp at the mouth of the alley.

Tony was almost asleep when someone started shaking him.

"Hey!" the guy said. "Are you all right, kid?"

Tony's head lolled back. "Yeah. Okay. I'd be better if you got us a hotel room." He did his best sexy just-woke-up look, but it probably wasn't very attractive because he was definitely getting hypothermia.

"I can't believe this," his erstwhile rescuer muttered, shaking his head. He had very blue eyes and very pale skin: that was all Tony could see, because the rest of his face was in shadow.

"C'mon, please?" Tony begged, dragging himself out of his slump against the wall. His teeth started chattering. "I'm gonna die if I don't get warm."

"Aren't there shelters for people like you?" the man asked, standing. For a second Tony thought he was going to leave, but then he bent down, grabbed Tony's wrist, and hauled him to his feet like he weighed nothing at all.

"Don't like `em," Tony said around his chattering teeth. Not sexy, Foster, he told himself, but his body wasn't listening: his hands started shaking, too.

"Why, they don't let you bring your drugs?"

"I like," Tony searched for the word, "being indep...independent. Okay? You gonna get us a room or not? If I freeze to death I'll haunt you. I promise."

"Well, we wouldn't want that," the man said, mouth curving.

He took Tony home in a BMW with heated seats and made him take a shower; when Tony was clean, the man pushed him down on the bed and banished the last of the chill from his bones. He was so effective that, caught in the grasp of the most amazing orgasm of his life, Tony almost missed the thing with the teeth and the blood and his wrist. He spent about a second being freaked out before he decided that, really, he could deal with it if it always meant he came his fucking _brain_.

"So," Tony whispered into the man's neck when they were curled together afterwards, "what name do you want me screaming for the rest of your life?"

"My life?" the man asked, running his fingers up Tony's spine.

"Okay," Tony amended. " _My_ life."

"And what, exactly, makes you think I'm interested in keeping you around?"

His voice sounded dangerous; Tony felt him smile, though, so he didn't think he was taking his life into his hands when he said "You."

There was a long pause, and then his fingers came up to twine in Tony's hair as soft lips kissed his ear: "Henry Fitzroy."

 

 

 


End file.
